Rediscovering Origen Today: First Impressions of the New Collection of Homilies on the Psalms in the Codex Monacensis Graecus 314

Contributo di carattere introduttivo: criteri esterni ed esterni per l'attribuzione ad Origene di Cod. Gr. 314 (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München)

Sensation and perception

One of the oldest and most difficult questions in science is how we are able to develop an awareness of the world around us from our senses. Topics covered under the title of, 'Sensation and perception' address this very question. Sensation encompasses the processes by which our sense organs (e.g. eyes, ears etc.) receive information from our environment, whereas perception refers to the processes through which the brain selects, integrates, organises and interprets those sensations. The sorts of questions dealt with by psychologists interested in this area include: 'how does visual information get processed by the brain?', 'how is it that I am able to recognise one face out of many many thousands?', and 'what causes visual illusions to occur?: Within New Zealand there are a number of researchers studying visual perception specifically and their research interests range from understanding the biologica

Imagining Alternatives? Latin American Scholarship on International Economic Law and the Global Economic Order

This Article analyzes the role of Latin American international economic law scholarship within the global economic order.  Many of the problems that Latin Americans face today relate to the global economy, such as labor conditions, access to medicine, and the use of natural resources, among others.  The discussion of these problems, however, seldom recognizes the role of international economic law scholarship.  Although the knowledge created by this scholarship may not completely explain why States actively behave in a certain way, it can serve to explain why they may refrain from certain actions.  This Article argues that scholarship on international economic law plays a crucial role in the creation and reproduction of the current global economic order.  If this claim is correct, regional scholarship can do more for Latin America than serving the advisory and litigation needs of States.  By recognizing its role in constituting the global economic order, international economic law scholarship can promote alternative theories and practices that may help Latin America and its people find their place in the global economy

A single mechanism can explain the speed tuning properties of MT and V1 complex neurons

A recent study by Priebe et al., (2006) has shown that a small proportion (27%) of primate directionally selective, complex V1 neurons are tuned for the speed of image motion. In this study, I show that the weighted intersection mechanism (WIM) model, which was previously proposed to explain speed tuning in middle temporal neurons, can also explain the tuning found in complex V1 neurons. With the addition of a contrast gain mechanism, this model is able to replicate the effects of contrast on V1 speed tuning, a phenomenon that was recently discovered by Priebe et al., (2006). The WIM model simulations also indicate that V1 neuron spatiotemporal frequency response maps may be asymmetrical in shape and hence poorly characterized by the symmetrical two-dimensional Gaussian fitting function used by Priebe et al., (2006) to classify their cells. Therefore, the actual proportion of speed tuning among directional complex V1 cells may be higher than the 27% estimate suggested by these authors

Stochastic order on metric spaces and the ordered Kantorovich monad

In earlier work, we had introduced the Kantorovich probability monad on complete metric spaces, extending a construction due to van Breugel. Here we extend the Kantorovich monad further to a certain class of ordered metric spaces, by endowing the spaces of probability measures with the usual stochastic order. It can be considered a metric analogue of the probabilistic powerdomain. The spaces we consider, which we call L-ordered, are spaces where the order satisfies a mild compatibility condition with the metric itself, rather than merely with the underlying topology. As we show, this is related to the theory of Lawvere metric spaces, in which the partial order structure is induced by the zero distances. We show that the algebras of the ordered Kantorovich monad are the closed convex subsets of Banach spaces equipped with a closed positive cone, with algebra morphisms given by the short and monotone affine maps. Considering the category of L-ordered metric spaces as a locally posetal 2-category, the lax and oplax algebra morphisms are exactly the concave and convex short maps, respectively. In the unordered case, we had identified the Wasserstein space as the colimit of the spaces of empirical distributions of finite sequences. We prove that this extends to the ordered setting as well by showing that the stochastic order arises by completing the order between the finite sequences, generalizing a recent result of Lawson. The proof holds on any metric space equipped with a closed partial order.Comment: 49 pages. Removed incorrect statement (Theorem 6.1.10 of previous version